Mastering efficiency: unveiling the DOWNTIME framework for a productive practice
By Karen Dunn Skinner and David Skinner
Have you ever stopped yourself in the middle of a task and thought: “Why am I doing this…there must be a better way”? It’s easy to get stuck doing things the same old way. Humans adapt well to broken processes and we’re great at creating workarounds. But adaptations and workarounds don’t solve the actual problem and they’re not typically very efficient. If you want to stop wasting your valuable time, you need to look at your work differently.
Welcome to the third article on our series, Eight Ways You’re Losing Time & Money in Your Practice. Check out Part 1 and Part 2 if you missed them. The DOWNTIME framework we cover in this series will completely change the way you think about your work and set the foundation for a more efficient, profitable, and productive practice.
Here’s a quick recap: Your work either adds value for your clients or it’s waste. To improve your productivity (without working harder), you need to identify the waste and then reduce or eliminate it. The DOWNTIME framework helps you identify waste.
Each letter in DOWNTIME stands for a different category of waste:
1. Defects
2. Over-production
3. Waiting
4. Non-utilized talent
5. Transportation
6. Inventory
7. Motion
8. Extra Processing
In our last article, we covered the first four wastes. Today we’re focusing on Transportation, Inventory, Motion, and Extra Processing, and we’re sharing how one of our clients eliminated four kinds of waste with their Bathroom Check-Signing Policy.
TRANSPORTATION
Transportation waste is the inefficient movement of things—documents or information—as opposed to people. That’s motion waste, and we’ll get to that in a minute. Transportation waste is everywhere in law practices.
Think about how paper moves in your office. How many times have you handed over paper receipts, signed a check, or printed an email? Think about your forms. Despite the availability and ease of online and fillable forms, many firms still send PDFs that have to be printed, completed, scanned back to digital, and then emailed. That’s a waste.
This week, take some time to watch how things actually move in your office.
Are hard copies carried around for sign-off or authorization?
Do you use a courier when documents could be sent electronically?
Do you submit paper receipts for reimbursement?
Are pre-bills printed and circulated between attorneys for review?
Do you print and file emails?
Once you start looking, you’ll see transportation waste everywhere. The good news is that there are plenty of solutions to eliminate it.
Use DocuSign or another digital signature program
Redesign your processes to reduce the number of required authorizations
Review documents online using PDF mark-up tools
Update your forms, so they can be completed, signed, and submitted online
Ask clients if they’d prefer electronic copies of bills and other communication (most will!)
Read on. At the end we’ll share how one client eliminated a major source of transportation waste, as well as many others, with some out-of-the-box thinking.
INVENTORY
It’s easy for information to pile up in a legal office. You may think that because you don’t sell goods, you don’t have an inventory, but in a knowledge business, your inventory is the files waiting for you to work on them, your overflowing inbox, your voicemails, even the extra stationery supplies piled up in your desk drawers.
Legal inventory often takes the form of work-in-process, including work that’s ready for you to start and work you’ve finished but haven’t billed and passed on.
Look around your office and see if you can identify at least three types of inventory waste that you can eliminate or at least reduce. For example:
How many files are stacked on your desk, waiting for you to take some action?
Do you have hours of billable time that you haven’t yet entered?
Is there a backlog of time that you’ve entered but haven’t billed, or bills you’ve issued but haven’t collected on?
What about your inbox? Is it packed with unread messages and attachments waiting to be filed properly?
Once you get started, it’s hard to stop.
A build-up of inventory interferes with the efficient flow of work—and cash, if we’re talking about time entries and collections—through your practice. By creating and implementing standard operating procedures designed to increase the flow of work, information and resources through your practice, you can reduce inventory waste and increase revenue and productivity.
For example, if WIP is your issue, implement a process for billing clients more frequently. If your overflowing inbox is the problem, look at an easy-to-use and inexpensive email solution like SimplyFile.
Tackling inventory waste is just one way you can use the DOWNTIME framework to accomplish more in your day without working harder.
MOTION
When your legal practice is buzzing with activity—when everyone and everything is moving—it feels like you have a busy and thriving practice. But if that movement isn’t adding value, it’s Motion waste.
Motion waste refers to any unnecessary movement that does not add value to your legal process. It includes people moving from place to place as well as smaller movements like keystrokes and clicks. Think of things like:
Ineffective document management systems that require people to physically search through filing cabinets
Boxes in the hallways you have to walk around
Complex digital desktops and folder structures that make it hard to find documents
Unnecessary in-person meetings that do not contribute significantly to the progression of an active case or project
Digital systems that require too many keystrokes and clicks to accomplish a task
Poor office layouts that force people to travel long distances to access equipment or resources they need
Pro tip: check on your printers! In many firms we’ve worked with, printers are a huge source of waste.
At one of our client firms, a group of paralegals had to walk 75 yards each way to access their assigned printer (we measured!). And they were doing this 150-yard round-trip as many as 30 times a day.
The solution was easy: relocate the printer. But until we asked them to identify the DOWNTIME wastes in their workplace, no one had thought about it. That walk to the printer was just the way they’d always done things.
Sometimes, the simplest changes can have the biggest impacts. Every bit of motion waste you eliminate will free up you and your team to do more of what matters most.
EXTRA PROCESSING
We get it. You're a perfectionist. You cover all the possible bases in your legal research. You answer questions your clients would have asked if only they’d known enough to ask them. You ensure every document is perfect…even when that means you spend hours editing your colleagues' work.
But ask yourself, if your clients knew you were doing all that extra work, would they be willing to pay you for it? Sometimes, when the stakes are high, the answer will surely be yes. But what about the other times?
If you’re delivering a Ferrari, when what your client wants (and needs) is the Ford, that's the waste of Extra Processing—the last of the eight wastes. It’s giving your clients more than they want, more than they need, and more than they are willing to pay for.
Extra processing can be hard to spot. Some examples include:
Creating reports, memos, or documents that are excessively detailed and go beyond case requirements
Making unnecessary reviews and revisions to documents without a clear improvement in quality
Creating custom solutions for routine tasks that could be standardized
Remember, the value you place on your work is irrelevant. What matters is how your client perceives the value. It all comes back to the Three Value Criteria. Ask yourself:
Is this what my client actually needs, given the risks or the facts?
Has my client ASKED me to do it AND would she be happy to pay me for doing it? If it’s internal work, would the firm be happy paying me for it?
Is it right already? Am I just making stylistic changes to satisfy myself?
Delivering the Ferrari instead of the Ford upsets clients and wastes your valuable time. And if clients push back, you might not get paid for it!
WRAP-UP
When you look at your work through the optic of value and waste, you can make impactful changes that increase the efficiency of your practice. However, when you’re used to working a particular way, identifying waste can be hard.
DOWNTIME provides an easy-to-use framework that will help you spot the waste in your daily work. Identifying the waste is the first step. Eliminating it is the next. That’s the topic of our next and final article in this series…but first, as promised, here is: THE BATHROOM CHECK-SIGNING POLICY
One of our clients found a unique way to eliminate the Defects, Waiting, Motion, and Transportation wastes associated with their manual check-signing process. They called it The Bathroom Check-Signing Policy.
The problem: every time a check needed a partner’s signature, someone from Accounting wandered around the firm looking for a partner to sign it (Motion and Transportation). Partners dreaded the interruption, and support staff hated interrupting them (Waiting), so checks often got left on people’s empty desks and chairs, only to be overlooked or buried under piles of files. Checks got lost (Defects) and payments were delayed (more Waiting).
Their solution: they set up a table outside the bathrooms used by partners, laid out some pens, and left the checks there. Partners reviewed them as they passed by and signed the ones they had responsibility for. It was a creative approach that worked with this firm’s layout and size.
The result: checks were signed faster, fewer were lost, and no one was interrupted.
Stay tuned for the next article in this series. We’ll provide you with step-by-step instructions for leading a waste-finding exercise in your firm, and additional case studies to inspire you to get the right people doing the right work in your practice.
About the Authors
Karen Dunn Skinner and David Skinner help lawyers earn more from their practices without working as hard. They believe every lawyer deserves a successful practice and the freedom to enjoy that success.
Together, they founded Gimbal Lean Practice Management Advisors after practicing law for more than 20 years in Canada and Europe. They’re the exclusive Global Advisors on Legal Process Improvement to the International Institute of Legal Project Management, and Karen sits on the IILPM’s Global Advisory Council.
Karen and David are global leaders in the application of Lean to the legal profession. They write and speak regularly, facilitate legal process improvement projects, and have taught Gimbal’s proven LeanLegal® approach to thousands of legal professionals around the world.
They combine their deep understanding of the legal industry with their training in Lean Six Sigma to provide practical solutions to the competitive and budgetary pressures on practitioners and clients alike.
Karen and David live in Montreal.
Something I wouldn't normally read, but I liked how you felt about it. Thanks for putting together something worth reading fnaf